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’s Boris Godunov. Building on the enthusiastic welcome, Diaghilev planned a greater triumph in a season of ballet and Russian opera. The Imperial Russian Ballet lent its leading artists, Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm and Tamara Karsavina, with Michel Fokine as choreographer. For stage design and costumes, Diaghilev obtained the gorgeous and barbaric talent of Léon Bakst, supplermented by outstanding painters, Soudeikine, Roerich, Alexandre Benois and others. The sensation of the first season was Cleopatra, whose music was a melange from at least five Russian composers. Russian themes mingled with Egyptian and Persian and even the original sorceress of the Nile could not have matched the ravishing beauty and figure of Ida Rubinstein borne on a palanquin surrounded by a whirling bacchanal of veils and rose leaves arranged to conceal the fact that as a dancer she was as yet barely trained. Paris found her almost “too beautiful, like strong perfume.”

Every year for the next six years the Ballet returned with new and exuberant productions which revolutionized choreography and stage design. Music was dignified by a full orchestra, with Pierre Monteux engaged as conductor. Additional operas—Moussorgsky’s Khovantschina, Rimsky’s Sadko and Ivan the Terrible—besides Prince Igor and Boris Godunov, were added to the repertoire. Pavlova later left the company, but in 1909 in Les Sylphides she seemed to dancing “what Racine is to poetry,” while Karsavina was “the exquisite union of classic tradition and revolutionary artistry.” For the music of this ballet two of Chopin’s piano compositions, Nocturne and Valse Brillante, were orchestrated by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Igor Stravinsky, then twenty-six, whom Diaghilev had commissioned after hearing his first performed orchestral work in St. Petersburg in 1908. In contrast to the classical delicacy of Sylphides, Fokine staged the savage Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor with Tartar-Mongol themes echoing in the music and a wild Asiatic horde of dancers against a scene in dull grays and reds, of low round-topped tents and rising columns of smoke stretching toward the infinite horizon of the steppe.

Emotion long absent from the ballet was infused by the voluptuous physical spectacles and intoxicating colors of Bakst. Houris of the Sultan’s harem from the Arabian Nights, bacchantes from a Greek vase, Russian boyars in boots, harlequins and colombines of the Commedia dell’Arte, forest creatures in maroon, green and gold suggesting “the sparkling beauty of spotted pythons,” tennis-players in modern dress took over the stage. Bakst inspired Paul Poiret and five years of women’s fashions. When planning Rimsky-Korsakov’s Schéhérazade with his associates, the red-haired Bakst in his elegant and scented clothes jumped on a chair and explained, in his guttural accent with explicit gestures, how the Sultan’s bodyguard should cut everyone to pieces: “everyone, his wives and all their Negro lovers!” For Schéhérazade he designed a setting to suggest “dreadful deeds of lust and cruelty” which Fokine interpreted enthusiastically in a dance of Negro slaves whom the Sultan’s wives persuade the eunuchs to liberate from their golden cages and who fling themselves upon the willing harem in an orgiastic dance of “spasms of desire.” The sexual theme was a favorite of the Ballet. For Thamar, the Caucasian queen, a Cleopatra à la russe, Bakst designed a medieval castle above a river into whose waters rejected lovers fell to their doom. In her various roles as temptress the delicate and flower-like Karsavina conveyed vice, as the critics said, “with a great deal of verisimilitude.”

When Rimsky died in 1908 Stravinsky composed a Chant Funèbre for a memorial concert in St. Petersburg. More than ever impressed, Diaghilev asked him to write the music for a ballet based on the Russian fairy tale of Prince Ivan and the Firebird. Set in a wood with a wicked wizard and twelve princesses under a spell, it evoked from the composer an imaginative score of mixed rhythms, graceful melody and a weird electric dance of